Freezeframe
by Ari Moriarty
Summary: In her own mind, it was like she could stop time. Written as part of a forty-minute challenge with Miss Hanamura.


**Author's Note: **This is not at all what I was originally supposed to write. I'm very sorry, Elisabeth. I know we discussed something entirely different, but this is what ended up happening. I, uh…I will someday get control of my own psyche. Possibly. It's a long-term goal.

Anyway, this is a response to the magnificent **Learn to Fly** piece by **Miss Hanamura**, and is, as I promised her, the product of an exactly forty-minute free-write!

**Freezeframe**

There were moments in the day-to-day come and go of life's little mysteries during which, every now and again, time seemed to stop.

It had started, at first, as a game, something that Naoto Shirogane played with her herself, inside her own head to make the problems less convoluted and the minutes less harrowing and heart-stopping in the heat of the hardest and most pressing problems. When she faced something truly horrible, something big, ugly, mean and imposing, something that caught her breath in her throat and made her want to scream for her mommy and daddy the way she'd already almost forgotten how to do, Naoto would stop time and take a moment to breathe, and to think.

First she'd inhale, one, two, three, four, and then exhale, five, six, seven, eight, until the frantic panic would begin to slow down, and things would take a more pleasing and compatible shape in her psyche. Naoto had been trained at a very young age to imagine the world as something she could control, something that she could pick apart, piece by piece, until it lay bare and exposed before her in a pile of the wheels and cogs that made the greatest mysteries of the cosmos twist and turn. Naoto was an analytical mind before she was a heart, or so she'd been led for most of her life to believe. She was a thinker, a keeper of mechanical and factual secrets, a person who could break things down until they were nothing but the bits and bobs that built them from the ground up. When she found herself in over her head, she'd take a moment to stop time in her mind, and to rationalize inside herself all of the things that seemed so hard to understand.

That had been so much easier to do before. Before, she'd been a part of a world that made sense, a world that was naturally rational and seemed to fit her needs as much as she sank into its patterns of daily life. Before, the world had been her analytical oyster.

Now, as a member of a team of freedom-fighters who by their very nature defied what she'd come to accept and revel in as reality, Naoto found herself needing more and more minutes to herself. Things around her just failed to make sense, and counting to ten wasn't cutting it anymore when she needed a moment to feel safe.

Now, her friends really did have super powers, and she really did live in a world where magic not only could be, but was, and was in a large and terrifyingly ludicrous way. Monsters roamed the streets of a dark and mysterious shadow realm, and the people she had lunch with at school every day defeated them by summoning greater and more powerful monsters that reflected the personalities she'd come to know and appreciate in her oh-so-human friends.

Naoto had a persona, and she had all the same powers that her friends seemed to have. Still, at her core, at the base of her soul, Naoto knew that her true super power would always be the ability to stop time, to slow down the world until it could make sense again and she could defeat it with logic and the expertise of years of watching the way the world worked.

She had the time, all the time in the world that she needed, because she was a part of a group that worked in tandem, taking turns to show their strengths and display their skills to defeat onslaughts of enemies. While Yosuke would fling himself full-force into the fray, with all the whirling and enthusiastic rage of a gust of violent wind, Yukiko would warm the hearts of everyone around her through the healing powers that kept them all alive and moving forward towards a common goal. Kanji could electrify the enemy with his energetic bursts of lightning-swift inspiration, and their fearless leader seemed to have the power that made all of their powers worthwhile, a power that they'd all have been meaningless without. He had the power to weave them together into an attack strategy that turned enemies into dust and by-gones. He gave them the will to keep going, and all of his other magical powers paled in comparison to that one magnificent gift.

Naoto knew that she, too, had something to offer, something that none of the others could ever have hoped to have. She had light, and darkness, even fire, but none of those things mattered as much to her as the one skill that she'd trained and honed her entire life.

While the others were hot and fierce, Naoto was cool, calculating, and collected. While they forged ahead, she could hang back. Their passionately flung attacks in the midst of a battle gave Naoto all the space she needed to slow time down in her own mind, to think, to collect, to analyze and to predict, in order to envision all the strategies and moments she would need to produce the perfect endgame.

She preferred that skill to any skill that her persona may have given her. It was a skill that she knew came entirely from her own intelligence, from her training, and from the pieces of her that she could own. It was part of who she was in a way that no magical powers could ever be, however much they may have come from her personality or from the inner workings of her soul. Naoto prided herself on being a working intelligence, a mind before a heart, a brain before her feelings.

When it came to her friends, however, and the times she fought alongside them, there was a chance for Naoto to let herself have those feelings, to feel so strongly and so powerfully about protecting her loved ones that she'd use, for them, her power to stop and consider time with all of her mind, soul, and heart.

For them she'd stop the world's turning, if that was what it would take to help them go on. With them, she felt a clarity of purpose like nothing she'd ever experienced before, a clarity that gave her an insight which turned her mind in to a sanctum, in which everything lay exposed and obvious, beautiful and un-obscured. For them, she had all the time in the world.


End file.
